Perhaps oMage isn't the right game for you then, since its literally a game about philosophy knife fights.
Except I grew up reading about Norman Borlaug, and knowing that genetic engineering is something mankind has been doing for thousands of years - and reading about nuclear power, and coming to see it as a perfectly valid form of energy if it weren't for this baffling habit we all seemed to have about only using it begrudgingly and fobbing off any responsibility for it onto the nearest scapegoat, and then...
And then I found out that the people who spent decades demonizing nuclear energy to the point where we'd rather choke the Earth to death than do the smart thing because of imaginary bullshit bogeymen, the people who'd turned "genetically modified organism" into something so scary companies were scrambling to purge it from their products?
They were, in all too many cases, the same people who considered themselves the face of the conservationist cause, the people who routinely invoked images of strip mines and "raw sewage spewing into the sea" and acid rain in their propaganda, who were, even as I grew up, starting to melt together with the people who sell people useless "supplements" and tell them it's the panacea and the antivax crowd.
So when I open the book and
immediately have that same Captain Planet propaganda being spewed in my face? Not a good first impression.
Then we move onto the more serious issue. I am not a terribly positive person. By which I mean I've been in therapy for depression since late elementary school. Losing the healthcare which used to cover the bills for those sessions has not helped. Nor has the election of a walking caricature to the Oval Office, or the subsequent revelations of what a rancid, disgusting, pestilent place this world is, and has always been. I have lost my ignorance of what America truly is, and so I must forcibly recreate it however I can, or else I'll just spiral downwards into total misanthropic nihilism. Fiction is my opiate from a world I can neither change nor accept.
Hearing the corebook's narrator smugly jeer to his apprentice about the vileness of modern society, how everyone is either a scared animal huddled in its den or a gluttonous monster eagerly destroying the lives of their lessers to pad their bank accounts? That completely obliterates my efforts to rekindle some semblance of optimism and faith in the universe, and then I either check out immediately or try to keep going and spend the next few hours feeling sick and broken, with a possible chaser of brief boiling hatred for humanity and the universe in general.
I think it's partially what
@EarthScorpion once pointed out - oMage is a product of the 90s. Its narrative of brave outsiders standing up to society and the Man, refusing to accept conventional wisdom and seeking bold new solutions to the problems of the day... it rings painfully false to people coming back to read it in 2017, because now we know how that worked out. All those cool young hackers sold out and became Google, faithful steed of the corporate elder statesmen. The revival meetings are now either perverse exercises in greed-as-religion or a cheap suit for the new Nazism to put on as it pleases. Speaking of which, turns out that those "bold new ideas" generally either fizzled, self-destructed, or turned into festering cancerous sores in the ever more tattered fabric of human civilization. Those people fighting back against Big Pharma went to Third World countries and promptly started getting people killed by making them distrust all foreign medical science, or stayed home, built little closed-off communities of supporters within the Internet, and quietly disconnected from the rest of reality.
There is no belief, no philosophy, no political or social or cultural movement in this world that has escaped the putrefying gaze of hindsight. A book constantly trying to sell its narrative with rhetoric pulled straight from the most recent victims' lips doesn't have much chance of making a better impression.
